The FireMonkey built-in ImageFX engine provides over 50 GPU-powered effects. These effects are nonvisual components that can be found in the Effects category on the Tool Palette. All the provided effects can be simply enabled or disabled by setting the Enabled flag from the Form Designer, or programmatically.

Almost all the effects have specific properties that you can customize depending on the application. For example, all transition effects have the Progress property, which is used to set the amount of progress (in percentages, %) through the transition from the first texture to the second texture. The specified properties can be found in the Object Inspector when the effect is selected in the Structure View. All numeric properties of any effect can be animated to provide a gradual evolution in time. Image effects can also be triggered.

FireMonkey effects are built using shader filters. The shaders modify pixels, either individually or in concert with others, to achieve various visual effects. These effects are not limited to bitmap image data; effects can be applied to the pixels of any 2D control in the user interface. Effects can be used at run time or at design time to change the look of the application's user interface. The FireMonkey effects do not disable any controls or functionalities when they are applied.

Additive effects

This kind of effect affects the images by adding new elements to the original image. The elements can be added to the edges of the image or to the entire image. The table below shows some of this kind of effect:

Transition effects

FireMonkey includes over twenty image transition effects, in which source pixels are progressively transformed into a target bitmap image, from simple fades to fancy banded swirls. The progress of the transformation is deterministic and can be set to an arbitrary percentage. This percentage can be animated to transition over time. To animate the progress of the transformation, see Apply an Animation Effect to a Property of an Image Effect.